Lost in traslation

It is being my most difficult time in my professional career, no doubts about this. At the same time I'm learning faster than ever I think. The highest difficulty in my job is coming from the envirnoment. I have to travel now every week to Paris to meet people that I'm meeting now for the first time that see me as a new competitor coming from London and who is not French.

Last week was very fun. I've met around 20 different people for the last weeks. Regarding a topic, I've attended several meetings where I've met always the same guys, 5 French colleagues. Since the beginning and given the situation I realized that I had to show an agressive attitude to build credibility rapidly or otherwise I was going to be considered someone no relevant. So I thought, ok, let's identify who are in the meeting and let's come across to each one the right message. The thing is that I've heard so many names that I've got confused and moreover when 20% of the meeting my colleagues were speaking in French.... I had identified a colleague as a simple manager, typical "Parisino", very fashion wearing always very smart suits and quite young, and I was challenging his arguments all the time and trying to undermine his propositions treating him like someone at my level just to show "be careful, I might not be able to speak French but I know what I say". And I was treating with a lot of respect another guy, older because I thought he was the Vicepresident. Both had the same name. One guy who looks like a teenager was considered by me like a graduate. But during the last meeting I pointed the supposed manager that I had received his mail and that I appreciated that information. He told me, yes, N is your contact for it. I thought, something is going wrong. The signature of the email said Director so it is strange that the teenager sends me the file...Next day, someone on the phone idenfied with the name and surname of the Vice President, asked me to send some information. I thought, his voice on the phone looks like younger. Everything was more confused when the supposed teenager told me some days after in the last meeting: R, come to my office tomorrow to discuss it. "To his office, I thought...."

Yes, the supposed teenager is a Director, a level higher than mine and has a nice office with coffe machine, 2 PCs, a round table.... The supposed manager is Vice president, two levels higher than me. And the old guy is just a manager like me. Ufh!!! what a disaster, my attitude has not been aligned during the last meetings according to the level of each counterparter! Anyway, I was laughing when I checked all the faces in the directory and realized about everything. Now every time I have to speak with the "teenager" and the "fashion guy" I am being very careful... Tomorrow I'll meet them again... I hope these meetings will turn out well!